(Note: I kept adding, I never ditched anyone as I got older – especially not George Formby!) And I know I’ll have missed people out too.

How I became a protest singer: I simply wrote about the things I cared about. All any writer can do is speak their truth. The songs represent my view of the world. So I never became a protest singer. I always was one. I just hadn’t started singing yet.

Fuller Bio

I wrote my first song when I was 11, which was before I had my first indoor toilet (it was back yard and bucket still at that point!)

I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was 16. I am mainly self taught but used to go to a guitar group too that was run by an elderly man named George. So thanks George.

I was busking in Liverpool city centre within three weeks with guitar chords scrawled on my arm to help me remember them.

My first musical success was when I won the title of Liverpool Echo Merseyside Busker of the Year in 1989 at the Festival Gardens Site.

I don’t think they ever ran the competition again afterwards so as far as I’m aware that makes me the reigning Merseyside champion busker, but I don’t busk anymore.

I’ve since gone on to play support to some of my heroes, such as Billy Bragg, Chumbawamba, Roy Bailey, Dick Gaughan amongst others.

I set up and run the Woody Guthrie Folk Club which takes place on the last Thursday of every month in Liverpool.

I also run the Working Class Life & Music Festival which is the largest celebration of working people anywhere on the planet!

Politically I was once in the Labour Party (I left before Blair was even PM) and am now happily on the “homeless left”. In other words, I’m not a member of anyone’s party.

I’d say I was on the Labour soft left as a teenager but have moved a long way leftwards since those days.

My politics have been influenced by reading Marx and Engels, but I have a deeply libertarian instinct that means I have great sympathies with “those dreadful anarchists” (as the Daily Telegraph probably calls them).

Outside of music, I am the founder of fan owned football club AFC Liverpool, so check them out. They are Sugar Daddy free – owned and governed by their own fans, just as I intended.